Post #2 Intro to THE COVER UP

With launch on May 15, I wanted to introduce you to Book Two of ZONE OF DECEIT.

I have always been drawn to the Hitchcockian premise in which ordinary people are pulled into events beyond their understanding—moments that demand more courage, clarity, and resilience than we think we possess.

Some of these moments are instantaneous; some evolve more gradually, as disquiet turns into risk and then to outright danger.

We rarely experience these moments on the scale of a thriller. But in quieter ways, we all encounter them. That makes reading about them even more fun!

Let's take a look at the beginning of Book Two.

THE COVER UP

Falling or Flying

April 1987

Deep in the Meta

My feet had swollen. The third day out from the truck, my boots had turned into an instrument of torture. One of the men spoke to the other, and he pulled a pair of sandals from his pack.  

He called them huaraches when he gestured to me, although the other man snickered and mumbled something. They were old. Barely strung together. The leather straps eaten away, the tire treads on the soles like something that had survived the apocalypse.

One foot in front of the other. Just an old saying, now it was more like a threat.

The campesino on the path ahead of me turned and spoke. As usual it sounded like an accusation, as usual I didn’t understand. He pointed and gestured; I wasn’t watching where I walked.

One foot in front of the other.

A flash of something in the sky—metallic? The man quickly moved under a tree. The one trailing me pushed me under as well. A flash. Yes, I remembered. Everything can end in a flash. Part of the long list of things I had never understood. Beneath the tree, I caught my breath. Looking forward up the path was like trying to look through a house of mirrors, tree after tree, bush after bush, crowding the narrow dirt walkway. “Endless…” I half-whispered it to myself. The men stared at me. I was not supposed to talk to them at all. We started out again.

Of course it sounded like a threat. I was walking to my death. Did I agree to this? Did I ever understand it would come to this?

“Alto!” My guide gestured to me to stop, with his large sun-darkened hand held out flat behind him. The other hand pointing ahead to a vermillion snake curled in a circle on our path. He squatted, waiting patiently for the snake to move. Finally, he tossed a small stone nearby, delaying a little longer until he could see it had gone. Gestured to me again, this time to move forward.

When did it all start? When I killed Ramirez— two years back? Or six months ago, when Lonnie French threw me to the wolves?  I had a sudden memory, watching a movie with Chris. Our messy living room, the VHS player that kept eating tapes, the beanbag pillows, all seeming like a vision of paradise right now. The Terminator, scary, challenging. The fluidity of time, and that one line, “I’ll be back,” that stayed with me, haunted me, a prophecy that bad things always return. But I didn’t listen closely enough.

I thought we had escaped the past. I finally learned. The past wasn’t a place you could avoid or a trip you could cancel. It was everything you did everyday of your life, the departure and arrival and the whole journey in-between. The present was just this fleeting instant that turned into the past even as you tried to closely hold it like a firefly.

I thought we were safe. But I found out soon enough, right from the day Chris watched as Challenger disappeared, right from the time my friends no longer had my back, that safety was not even on our dance card.

I sighed, surprising the man in front of me. His weathered face creased as he looked closely at me, then relaxed as he looked away, wiped his brow, reset the broad hat. And silently moved off, up the trail, the endless trail. Towards a reckoning I would never have guessed was in my future.

I had to keep going. Viva berraquera, as the general wrote in the message he sent, part of the trap he had set for me. Keep the faith. And I would, if not for me, then for Chris. I moved forward, toward an unpredictable ending. Because of a one-in-a-thousand bet that I chose to make.

Standing in the middle of nowhere, of my own free will.

One foot in front of the other, all the way to the very end.

***

January to August, 1986

New York City

The phone rang; it was the nurse from Chris’s school. She sounded harried. “I’m helping to make calls. Can you come pick Chris up?”

“What’s wrong, what’s he done?”

“Mr. Sanders, turn on the TV. Then come.”

I hung up, turned on the tube.

Special Coverage. Of course it was a special day today. The kids were getting a live feed from Florida, where the NASA space shuttle flight included a wonderful teacher — an “Educator in Space” from a New Hampshire school. Chris looked forward to seeing Christa McAuliffe float around in space, free, for once, from gravity, in one of those strange, grainy black and white sequences the entire country would watch at the same exact time.

***

In my apartment, the TV image resolves into a replay, Earlier this Morning. It is Cape Canaveral. The white shuttle is on the launch pad, looking almost dainty against the giant copper-colored engine, two long white boosters alongside. A pantheon. Like they turned space travel into a Holy Trinity.

The network host, Tim Minter, CNN: “T minus 21 seconds and the solid rocket booster engine gimbal is underway. T minus 15.”

White smoke leaking from the edges of the giant vehicle in the stark sunlight.

“T minus 10, 9, 8, 7, 6.”

Thin streams of liquid hydrogen crisscross below the engine exhausts and ignite. Suddenly the scene is brilliantly, fiercely alive, yellow and orange.

“We have main engines start.”

It is easy for me to imagine the school, the kindergartners having marched their awkward, hapless way into an auditorium already packed with older students. As Minter announces liftoff through the tinny speakers of the old projection equipment, there is complete silence in the auditorium. Even the fidgeters are perfectly still.

“We have liftoff of the twenty-fifth shuttle mission, and it has cleared the tower.” Applause from mission control can be heard in the background.

The simplicity, elegance and power overwhelm me. The shuttle, camera angle now from the side, rises slowly and inexorably into the air.

Gasps and cheers from the kids.

NASA to the shuttle: “Roger and on, Challenger.” Within seconds, the ship is reduced to a flaming spot centered in an empty sky. “Throttling down now. Three engines running normal, three good APUs. Velocity 2,253 feet per second. Altitude downrange 4.3 nautical miles.”

The shuttle and its engines, just a speck in the blue. A flash or glitch unsettles the screen, then a plume of smoke and fog. What looks like giant white smoking sparks shoot out from all sides of a central cloud. The camera draws back, the cloud now looking like some giant lobster, claws reaching up as the boosters, far apart from each other, continue to move away. The screen zooms in on multiple smoke streams falling towards earth like some grand fireworks display.

Silence from Cape Canaveral drags on. Then: “We have a report from the Flight Dynamics Officer that the vehicle has exploded. Uh, that’s confirmed.” The voice is factual, only a hint of regret breaking through the NASA discipline.

In an instant, I’m running out the door to school. I picture the auditorium—now it’s a nightmare scene. Kids looking around, at each other, away from the screen. The older kids shocked; for the younger ones, quiet raucous becomes loud raucous. They begin to get up, move around. Talk to each other. The teachers are still staring at the small screen, appalled.

As I hear later, Chris is in his seat in the kindergarten row. His eyes never leave the screen, which is again tracking several white plumes shooting downward from the giant cloud.

Without warning, he is reliving his mother’s death: the cataclysmic failure of her plane, the fall from 25,000 feet, the disappearance of her remains, sucked away into the heat and flames. All the terrible things Chris still believes happened, until I think he’s ready to hear the truth. All the pain and loss he managed to place in perspective through months of therapy, and now the wounds are wide open again.

Chris remains seated, gripping the small, shiny, scarred wooden armrests, unwilling to let go.

***

He returned to twice-weekly sessions. After three months he was visibly improved, sleeping peacefully some nights.

For my part, I could not escape a deepening anxiety. The fragility of our recovery hit me hard. This hadn’t been an attack or a threat or a crisis. Just a tap on the shoulder from the past, letting me know that it was still right there and always would be.

Chris lost that feeling of dread. He moved on, and not just because of therapy. Through a kind of divine intervention, a teacher at Chris’s school was intent on showing that art could impact kids’ lives in more ways than parents could imagine. By spring, drawings were all over our apartment. Crayon blue sky. A sun. Sometimes a line of brown or green ground, sometimes more detailed.  Always a figure, a stick figure. Always in the air. Sometimes horizontal, floating. Sometimes vertical, like a falling figure. Sometimes the figure wore a helmet. Over the summer, the drawings grew more complex. Many were lovely, some were disturbing.

Our therapist, MaryAnn, tried to reassure me. “It’s good. We call this a toolkit, for when things get tough. And you know, I think art may be his thing.”

“But these are all falling people. Falling women.” I might have sounded a bit emotional.

“We’re talking about complicated things. Falling and flying. Being in the air. Being in heaven. And yes, women: your wife, his mom, or angels or astronauts. And he’s up there with them.”

“I’m not up there. Is that okay?”

She paused, sighed. “I think I could share with you… I did ask him that, what about your dad? He said he needed you on the ground.”

I looked around the apartment, the dim spaces so normal in New York buildings, the shafts of light or sun held to specific glimmers, bordering a window, shining pinpoint from a mirror. Me, here, earthbound, struggling to move through the mud. My son, skyward.

“Mr. Sanders? I hope you know you’ve helped Chris achieve so much this year.”

“Thanks.”

“I gather you’re working more now.”

“Yes, nearly full time.”

“Congratulations.”

But so much had been my fault; I needed to admit that. “MaryAnn, I thought we had escaped the past. I told him we were safe.”

She was silent, then spoke softly. “I understand. As I said, congratulations, Mr. Sanders.”

I was the man on the ground, like the head of the control room at NASA. What power did I have? How could I avert a tragedy? Was I just a clueless onlooker?

Who was I to ever again say “We’re safe now” to my son?

Because once you’re marked, bad things can find their way to you every day.

Like the man said, “I’ll be back.”

***

September, 1986

New York City

Federal Bureau of Investigation

The hallway I stood in, feeling slightly nervous in anticipation of my meeting, was in a state of change. Signs of a recently removed assistant’s desk included indents in the carpet, dust bunnies, phone and electrical wiring and a few small piles of  scrap. There was a door: solid dark wood on the bottom, milky glass on top with a space for a nameplate. I knocked, but there was no answer.

Slightly nervous was a lie. I was anxious and on edge. The last time I had been in this office was six months ago, when I was formally appointed as consultant to the CondoGate team. It meant a lot. It was a statement that I was on a new track, working for the FBI and getting to wrap up the case that had taken my wife away from me.

I worried that I was being called in so soon after the management change. Someone looking over the case with fresh eyes could have uncomfortable questions for me. What part had I really played in the deaths of the Scullers and Ramirez? I’d never admitted a thing, but I had never been pushed hard about it.

The new Agent-in-Charge, Lonnie French, was a veteran, highly regarded as a no-bullshit colleague. He had been in the field, central to the recent, unprecedented Mafia takedown. He was smart and reportedly demanding of himself and his colleagues.

The door was ajar. I pushed it and gingerly entered the large, nearly empty office. A man was leaning over the desk, fiddling with a light bulb. “I don’t need an assistant. Haven’t ever had one, don’t want one now. Although, what the fuck is this thing? Isn’t there just one kind of light bulb?” He looked up. “But you’re not here to apply, are you?” Had to be Lonnie French.

“Philip Sanders. You asked to see me.”

“Yeah.” He sipped at a glass of water and gestured toward a chair. “I want a personal view of CondoGate. I mean, personal from your point of view. As a team member, and, well, whatever it is you are.” He waved a hand over a pile of papers on his desk.

I took in my own personal view, of Lonnie French. The top of his head, which was balding. Firm features, a placid look but toughness reading right through the calm. Like a Buddha, but one whose idea of enlightenment was capital punishment.

“I’ve read it,” he said. Pointing to the mass of CondoGate paperwork, he corrected himself. “A fraction of the thing. God help me, Dostoevsky took me eight months. I don’t have that time. I mean, these Scullers. Depraved. Evil.”

He stopped twisting the lightbulb, turned toward me. “But what I want to focus on today is you, because I find you the hardest part to understand.”

His glance at me was knife-edge sharp but brief; he looked away as he again crouched over the lamp. “So, I insert this and twist it. Really? I’m fucking Polish, which makes this a cliché.”

His focus on the task at hand made his statement seem offhand. But the glance gave me a shock. “Harder to understand than the evil Scullers?” I asked, seeing if this was his idea of a joke.

“I played poker with the Mafia biggies. I understand criminals. Sometimes even enjoy them. But you?”

Not a joke. “What do you find so confusing?”

“Remind me. You came to New York…?” He pointed to the paperwork. I knew he knew all this, but I answered anyway.

“I came to the city six months after my wife died in the crash.”

“Supposedly died.”

“Back then, that’s what I believed.”

He paused, leaned in. “Did you have any suspicion she wasn’t on the plane, before you came here?”

“Of course not.”

“Maybe you suspected she was alive and in New York?”

The bad-cop thing was alarming—French’s bald head radiating this intensity. He looked like a human bullet. I wouldn’t want him aiming at me; I shook my head.

“And your sister was already here. A consultant to the Scullers.”

“To a lot of real estate firms.”

“She got you your apartment.”

“That was a big help.”

“The apartment came through the Scullers. And your sister got Sculler Senior to invest in your wife’s film.”

“I think it’s how Ellie was able to learn what the Scullers were doing.”

“You don’t know?”

“That all happened before I came. When I came, I was escaping.”

“You did a bad job. Like evacuating into a disaster zone.”

Couldn’t argue with that.

“Well, mysteries are a thing for me.” His smile broadened into a grin that was a little too wolfish for my taste. “I can’t offer you coffee. Or anything. Not set up yet.”

I shook that off. “It’s the thought that counts.”

“I haven’t found that to be the case. For me, it’s what you do that counts.”

He sat in his chair, tried leaning back, turned it to one side, then the other. Each time he turned, it creaked and whined. “Ah, jeez.”

“Try WD40.”

“Good idea. If they made it for knee joints, I’d be golden.” Hands behind his head, like this was a breezy conversation just happening to touch on something important here and there.

“Just to make sure I get it, your wife somehow managed to uncover all these hidden facts, but this was out of the goodness of her heart?”

“Absolutely.”

“Then she’s in a plane crash. Then she’s not. She disappeared.”

“Sir, we found out all about this—”

“And you didn’t know a thing.”

Lonnie French just sat there, chin in hand, observing me.

I asked, “Was there a question?” Or maybe a threat?

More silence. Finally, he shook his head. “Naw, it’s natural for me to interrogate, just think of it as breaking the ice.”

“Well, I appreciate your being so straightforward.”

He ignored that obvious lie, shook his head. “Again, about your wife…” He called out. “Hadlow, get in here.”

Charles Hadlow immediately entered the room. A sympathetic glance told me he had clearly overheard some of the tense exchanges. “Mr. French, sir?”

French pointed to his desk. “Show him the article.”

Charles picked up a sheet of paper.

“Charles got this from our clipping service.”

It was a xerox of a short piece in Variety.

Director Dies, Film Survives

According to Cherisse Fantone, formerly at Bigelow Productions, Eleanor Bigelow had been finalizing work on a documentary about children and young adults living on the street in New York when she died in 1984’s tragic AMAir plane crash. The film, tentatively titled Lost on the Streets, is expected to play festivals later this year in advance of potential distribution deals.

They saw my shocked reaction. I couldn’t possibly hide it. “What? When…”

“Yesterday.”

I tried to slow my breathing, pretended to read. But the words were a jumble.

“See why I’m running a little hot today, Sanders? Your wife is back.”

“Just let me… Yes, it’s a shock.”

French sat back. “Our friendly DC FBI headquarters saw this article as well and I got an earful. Barely in the job and the first shitstorm has to do with you. Bizarre, right? I’m now running this giant case. Unbelievable crimes. But something about the case bothers our bosses. Like this article: your wife and this film pop up, such a coincidence. It starts them thinking. They ask if maybe your wife was connected with the Scullers, then turned on them. Maybe took some money, used it to make her movie, or sent it to you when she disappeared. Maybe not a goodhearted thing.” He said all this as if it were idle chit-chat and not a felony.

’They asked you that?”

He briefly looked like I had caught him in a fib. “No. I wondered that.”

“Mr. French, she didn’t make away with anything.” The words began to settle down, I could read exactly what the article said. “This doesn’t say my wife is alive. This is about what she was doing before she died. She was caught. She’s dead. As you know.”

“Well, right here in this article it says she died in that plane crash, which we know is not true. Two years later and we’re still hiding what really happened to her—”

I broke in. “Hiding what happened in Vermont was a choice the Bureau made.”

Charles interrupted, focusing on French. “It helped us identify people aiding and abetting the Scullers. Four related indictments.”

French clearly disagreed. “Not good enough. We are eighteen months in and the case isn’t rounding out.”

Charles disagreed. “We are close.”

“Close is losing. We’ve mentioned cocaine but can’t prove the pipeline. We’ve hinted at pornography but can’t find the pervs. You’re not really listening, Hadlow. Washington wants to shut down CondoGate.” He held up the article. “More stuff like this? Kiss it goodbye.”

Charles was stunned. I was stunned. French let it sink in for a minute, watching both of us. He stood, walking to the large window overlooking Foley Square, stared down at the noontime crowds.

He returned to his desk and sat, the chair once again creaking. He spoke with less animation. “I hope you learned something from this meeting. I’m going to look at everything, no assumptions, and I’m going to push hard on all the weak points.”

He looked closely at both of us. “And I’ve told DC we’re continuing the case.”

French rose, the seat giving a baby’s anguished cry. The meeting was over, but he wasn’t finished. He nearly snarled at Charles. “Hadlow, you have one job. Get to the bottom of all the allegations we haven’t nailed. We need results on something fast, before our funding gets cut.” He turned to me as if he was enjoying beating me down. “Sanders, Sanders.” He chanted it like a nursery rhyme. “This is what you do. You find out about the film — get hold of this Fantone woman. Make sure it’s all innocent. And look again at every last thing about your wife. Did you actually know what she was doing? Did you actually know who she was? Your team clearly believes you know the case and have the ability to deal with facts; I assume that’s why you were made a consultant. Here’s a novel idea — consult! Find out the truth, and this time, tell us what you know, all of it.” He shook his head as if I were a real disappointment to him.

French lifted the CondoGate file off his desk with a visible effort and let it fall back with a thud. “Meanwhile, I’ll be sitting in this crap chair, reading the whole thing page by page.”

It felt like one more threat.

***

Best wishes, Andy

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